Destructive Data Mining: The Expert Challenge

Listen up mercenaries! Weapon manufacturers around New Eden are working hard on new experimental weapons. As part of their research, they are requesting the aid of mercenaries everywhere in a bid to find experts and generate more combat data with these weapons. To the best, they offer the chance to leave their name on these weapons for all to see.

If you believe that you are unrivalled with your chosen armaments, enter battle and use prototype weapons to kill other mercenaries. While you fight, battle data will be captured, and data from the best mercenaries will be used to further improve these new experimental models.

As a token of thanks, each manufacturer will offer the mercenary that generates the most useful data (i.e. kills the most people) the opportunity to name the new weapons – and will grant them a small stockpile of their new tool of destruction. If this sounds like something you want, there’s only one thing to do: grab your best gun, drop in, and start shooting.

The rules

During the four weekends from Friday, 27 June to Monday, 21 July, the character with the highest number of kills on a single weekend during the event period using a base prototype weapon (see full list for specifics) will be granted the chance to name a new Officer variant of that weapon. In addition, you’ll be given thirty copies of this new weapon. Each weekend’s score is taken individually, and are not added together.

The following weapons categories are eligible:

Assault Rifle

Combat Rifle

Rail Rifle

Scrambler Rifle

Laser Rifle

Mass Driver

Sniper Rifle

Plasma Cannon

Swarm Launcher

Heavy Machine Gun

Forge Gun

Shotgun

Although the reward will be to name a weapon in a specific weapon category, kills are counted according to specific weapon types. For example, if you were to achieve 500 kills with a Duvolle Assault Rifle and 200 with a ‘Construct’ Duvolle Assault Rifle, your score for Assault Rifles on that weekend would be 500, not 700. If 500 was the highest score during a single weekend over the duration of the event period, you would be given the chance to name a new Officer variant of the Assault Rifle.

Each weekend period begins at 12:00 UTC (8:00 AM EST) on the Friday, and ends at 12:00 UTC on the Monday (8:00 AM EST). In the event that two players earn the identical top score over a single weekend, the player with the most total kills over all weekends with all prototype weapons will be granted the reward. A single player may name multiple weapons if they manage to achieve the highest scores with each of them. All scores are taken on a character basis, though all characters from a single account are eligible. Note that only kills in Public Contracts are counted towards this challenge.

Weapon names are not restricted to the name of the winning character, but are still subject to approval from CCP. CCP retains the right to refuse any suggestions for names by the winning player. If a compromise between CCP and the winning player cannot be reached, the naming rights will be moved to the next highest scoring player.

The following is the full list of eligible weapons and their category. Any weapon not listed here is ineligible for this challenge.